When the novelist Howard Jacobson heard of Donald’s Trump victory over Hillary Clinton he was so angry he wrote a novel called Pussy, because that is how intellectuals fight. It told the story of the childhood of a fictional Donald Trump, a monstrous infant called Fracassus.

Fun – and horrifying – as Pussy was, how much more fun would Jacobson have had with the lawyer Roy Moore, the latest monstrous infant to attempt a serious political career, standing for – and losing, although of course he has not conceded as I write, for infants don’t concede – a senate seat in Alabama with Trump’s endorsement this week?

I have been to Alabama. It has flags on every lawn. It loves God, and guns, and a God with a gun above all things. I even found a stall selling cookies in aid of Pilots For Christ. A state so riven with racism it produced To Kill A Mockingbird as an act of denial, found a line eventually in Roy Moore. Too much, said the voters. Don’t help us.

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Even a brief foray into Moore’s world is enough to make your head blow off. That he is accused of sexually assaulting teenagers – which he denies, blah blah – is one of his lesser insanities. He is particularly obsessed with the Ten Commandments. That, of course, is not unusual in the South, but even the most God-fearing of judges rarely feels the need to carry them around, carved in stone, in a flatbed truck. Is it because – in word-count terms – they are short? Are they all he can actually read? They used to be stationary, in the foyer of his court-house, but where is the fun in that?

Moore was, it should be noted, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama until he quit, while suspended for being nuts, to run for the Senate. It is almost as if, with his personal Ten Commandments, he thinks everyone is stupid; and he is projecting. He is stupid, I think, looking at his square and vacant face. Does he know he is stupid? He rode to the vote on a horse and the horse looked like it would be the more reasonable and well-briefed legislator by some margin. I also think the horse was trying to run away from Roy Moore. Watch the footage.

His whole career has been dogged by issues related to his personal copies of the Ten Commandments, so much so that I wonder if he would have been happier as a stone mason. He used to have another one – this one in wood so the next one will presumably be gold – on the wall of his courtroom. Gays, liberals, and marijuana smokers knew him as their enemy when they saw the Ten Commandments, and heard him open court sessions with prayers beseeching divine guidance for jurors. If I were a juror that would make me feel very unsafe.

There was a row about this because it is illegal to put the Ten Commandments on the wall of a courtroom, even in Alabama, even if you are nuts. And so, he lost, but he is waiting for a recount, or divine intervention via weather. Maybe God will appear in a bush or maybe he won’t. Either way, liberals are happy. But they shouldn’t be. Someone else – someone worse – will be vomited up by the right. Or the left. This is an age of crazy and this is how empires fall.

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